I want to acknowledge the contributions my colleague Kamal Jethwani and his team made to this post.

The business value of medication adherence tools is coming into focus. For years, I remarked that, while we could create a case for why adherence was the right thing to do, we had great difficulty creating the right financial incentives to move these programs from curiosity to scale. That is changing now with the collision in the marketplace of new payment models and exorbitantly priced pharmaceutical products.

The poster child for this phenomenon is the drug Sovaldi, which represents a miracle cure for Hepatitis C infection but costs $84,000 for a course of therapy. But if the patient doesn’t finish the entire course, the money is largely wasted. In that context, the price of any adherence solution is small compared to the cost of a failed treatment.